Danielle Schmitt PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

University of California, Los Angeles

Research focus

Illuminating compartmentalized metabolic regulation in single cells

Faculty host

Whitney Edwards, PhD

Danielle Schmitt obtained her Bachelor of Science in chemistry and biochemistry from Ball State University, where she was a Lewis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation Scholar. She earned her PhD in biochemistry from the University of Maryland Baltimore County under the mentorship of Songon An, where she identified the mechanisms for forming multienzyme complexes produced by metabolic enzymes. She completed her postdoctoral training as a California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California San Diego with Jin Zhang. There, she used genetically encoded reporters for kinase activity to study subcellular regulation of cellular signal transduction. Schmitt joined the University of California, Los Angeles faculty in 2022. Her research team investigates how cells organize essential processes like metabolism and signaling to coordinate cell function and fate. They take a multidisciplinary approach to identify mechanisms for subcellular compartmentation of metabolic processes, including signaling networks regulating metabolism and metabolites, and develop new genetically encoded tools to study metabolic events in single cells.